Helena’s Stories is turning out to be a series of four books that tell documented stories from our family history. The first, A Perfect Plan, a lovely story, was published in the spring of 2016, and re-published in April of 2017, along with the second book, Rule!

Rule! consists of nine historically accurate ancestral stories, with their historical context, set in Britain (England, Ireland and Scotland), France, Germany, India, and St. Helena’s Island (in the south Atlantic).

In the summer of 2017, I started writing Promise, as planned. But my first story for Promise, “A Good Place” turned into a novel of its own. So Promise was postponed until A Good Place was written and published, which happened in the spring of 2018. I’m slowly getting a toehold on Promise now and plan to publish it in 2020.

A Good Place is the story of documented settlers in the early Virginia colony. It centers around John Powell, an English settler, his daughter Mary and his indentured servant Thomas Prater. It’s, of course, a romance based on real people, but it’s also an adventure story, a look at what life was like during the process of making the wilds of America into farmland, and a view of what was happening deep in the woods “above the falls.”

Promise will track the stories of three families, the Atkinsons, the Stills and the Yeargins from colonial times in the American South to California in the late 1800s where the Davies family (of A Perfect Plan and Rule!) ties in. Promise’s stories all take place in America and there are many amazing true stories to tell.

Helena’s Stories is a terrific project and I’m having such a good time with it!

Back to writing…